The Greedy Gardener

The borage in my garden keeps on going and going - as one flush of plants fade away, another lot of seedling follow on. Borage self seeds prolifically so I’m not sure whether the plants are all from last year that have just chosen to germinate at different times or whether the new ones are from this year’s early flowers. I let it do its thing and pop up wherever it likes. Plants grow nearly as tall as me, but if it gets a bit unruly, I pull it up and compost it - borage acts in a similar way to comfrey in that it draws potassium from the soil and its juicy stems and leaves rot down quickly.

Borage is a lovely flower, with cornflower blue, five pointed blooms, but the plant itself is a bit rough and hairy. All of the plant is edible and tastes like cucumber. The flowers are lovely as a garnish for salads and soups or you can freeze them in ice cubes - the perfect addition to a glass of Pimm’s. Borage is also known as bee-bread because the bees love the nectar laden flowers so much. When it’s in full bloom, there’s a blue haze over my salad beds and the sound of the bees is quite incredible.

In Spain and Italy, they eat the young leaves and stems in spring soups with other early greens - it grows wild on road sides and field edges along with other foraged plants such as wild garlic, mallow and fennel. An oil is also extracted from the seeds which has similar properties as evening primrose oil.

Tigerella tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, green basil, purple basil, garlic, olive oil, balsamic, salt, pepper. It’s taken them an age to ripen in this disappointing summer, but well worth the wait.

A selection of some of the salad leaves I’ve been experimenting with. Clockwise from top left: golden purslane, red frills mustard, red veined sorrel, Greek cress and ice plant. The ice plant in particular has struggled in a water logged bed, but they’ve all proved really tasty.  The ice plant and purslane are very mild in flavour but have a pleasing succulent crunchiness that makes a good foil for the stronger flavoured cress, sorrel and mustard, or other leaves like rocket and mizuna.

I was going to post a photo of my hawthorn tree in all its blossoming glory, but the heavy rain in the week has made the blossom start to drop so it’s past is best now. Instead, here’s one from last weekend with some of the hawthorn branches at the top and the dark pink of next door’s weigela drooping over the fence. This is the perfect salad bed that I have spent the afternoon resowing after it was marauded by escapee chickens earlier in the week.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours repairing last week’s chicken damage after the ravening creatures escaped from their run and trashed two of my salad beds. The little gem lettuces were hearting up nicely and the red cocarde loose leaf variety were just about ready for me to start taking off a few leaves when they got well and truly stomped on. The chickens haven’t actually eaten very much, but it had just rained and the ground was very soft so they went mad scratching for worms and things. After being replanted and a few days of rain, they’re starting to look a bit less stunned and put out some tentative growth.

Elsewhere, they scratched though several patches of just about germinating baby leaf salad and some other salad leaves that I’ve been cropping for about a month. The the established leaves should recover and the almost seedlings seem to be carrying on germinating, albeit with a few bald patches so I’ve resown those and scattered some compost over them.

Some patches, however, were past rescuing, so I’ve dug them up and resown completely. Hopefully, if the weather picks up, they should be putting lightening growth at this time of the year. The irony of it is that the mangled ones I’ve dug up ended up being fed to the chickens - you’d almost think they’d planned it

When chickens attack

These are the new beds planted up with lettuces, edible flowers, claytonia, chives and salad burnet, with a few twigs strategically placed to keep the cats off. Unfortunately, they don’t look quite as delightful now because some of the chickens got out through a hole in the fence and scratched up the beds.

In just a few minutes, they scattered the young plants all over the place and trashed parts of the other raised beds. After rounding the culprits up and shutting them in their run, I’ve replanted the battered lettuces and rescued some of the seedlings. There are a few patches of cut and come again salad that they’ve trampled which should hopefully bounce back but some of the seedlings will have to be resown. I am especially sorry to see a fine crop of pea shoots that I was looking forward to harvesting that is beyond redemption. They clearly have discerning tastes. It just goes to show you can’t be too careful with this charming but voracious creatures.

The garden always looks really neat and tidy this time of year. New seedlings grow in straight rows or as individual transplants and the wooden edges of the raised beds make everything look regimented. But as the peas scramble up their twig supports and the parsley fills out, the edges will soon soften. Add to that the various self seeded marigolds and nasturtiums I allow to run riot wherever there’s a gap, it will be its usual jungle by July. I’ve decided to relocate the courgettes to the allotment though because their huge leaves and sprawling habit make it really difficult to see where to put your feet and I’ve nearly come a cropper no end of times. As my gardening activities are still somewhat restricted following a spinal injury last year, I’ve decided I don’t want to tempt fate.

Summer salad - pea shoots, claytonia, mizuna, red mustard, violas and wild garlic flowers.

This is the first year that we’ve had the whole allotment in production as well as the garden, so there’s been a bit of rearranging going on. The four main beds in the back garden are now mainly given over to salad leaves and herbs like parsley and coriander that I use all the time for convenience. These multicoloured leaves are grown in strips as cut and come again - I should get three or four cuts from each strip before I pull them up and resow. There’s another bed with similar contents I sowed last weekend so I’m hoping with those plus the terraced lettuce bed, I should have a succession of different salad right through to the autumn.

From left to right, Moroccan cress, Greek cress, Mizuna, Giant Red Mustard, Golden Streaks mustard, red sorrel, rocket and wild rocket. All these are brassicas and so need rotating to avoid club root which is why I’ve kept them separate from other leaves like claytonia, lettuce and purslane. There are various interlopers that have self seeded from last year, mainly nasturtiums and borage, so I’ve weeded some of them out but left the ones round the edges as they are beautiful and tasty but I don’t want them drowning out the salad - borage can grow taller than me.

Claytonia, miner’s lettuce, winter purslane - whichever of this curious plant’s many names you want to use, I will definitely be growing a lot more of it. It has a mild yet fresh taste and its leaves and juicy stalks are refreshingly crunchy, making it ideal to mix with other stronger tasting salad leaves. It can be sown in spring or autumn and stays green all winter, forming a dense cushion of leaves. I realise now I sowed this sample patch too late and too closely. According to Joy Larkcom, it self seeds prolifically, so I’ve now scattered more of the tiny seed in a place where it can stay all year round and do its own thing.